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Journal _xeno_'s Journal: Why I Switched Back to Windows from Linux 8

Journal by _xeno_
About three years ago, I made the switch to Linux off of Windows 98. And after figuring out how to get the system up and running, I was finally able to use Linux as my primary operating system. The only time I would return to Windows 98 was if I wanted to play a game that wouldn't run in Wine (or wasn't playable in Wine).

And life was good, I used Evolution for e-mail when it finally stabalized, and used Mozilla for my web-browser. The platform was stable, and would do anything I wanted it to do. But something happened. Windows 2000 was released, and I upgraded to it (being a student at a college with a campus license agreement means I basically paid for it already). I still used Linux for my desktop, and Windows for gaming. But Windows was much more stable, and much more usable.

I continued to fight with my RedHat install over software I wanted to install. Eventually I gave up on RedHat and moved to Mandrake. But I didn't stay there long, getting fed up with Mandrake and finally moving over to Debian. Debian was a lot nicer at giving you want you wanted, software wise, and much better at avoiding the dependency hell that RPMs inevitably seem to bring. Until I wanted to install Gnome 2.

Well, Gnome 2 had packages. But the requirements worked out like this. The Gnome 2 task, which would install all the other packages, required X. (Not surprisingly.) But X required XDM, for some reason. Gnome 2 also required GDM. But GDM conflicts with XDM. It was impossible to install Gnome 2. So, fed up with dselect, and finding aptitude to be subpar (although superior to dselect, although almost anything is), I switched to Gentoo.

Gentoo, for the most part, alleviated the dependency hell. The Gentoo packagers where much better at creating a stable ports tree. However, Gentoo takes forever to set up and requires a weekend a month to get it up to date. (I am currently unaware of how to say "only update packages with security problems," other than to figure out what's installed and update manually, assuming you know all the security flaws. I haven't found a good way to do that.)

While switching over to Gentoo, I also started switching back over to Windows. In Windows, everything just worked. It crashed occasionally, but it worked. (Then again, at least for me, X would crash - hard - occasionally, and only sometimes would I be able to SSH in and fix it.) With the Cygwin tools, I was able to use the powerful Unix commands on my Windows system. Plus I no longer needed to reboot if I wanted to play games.

Several other things keep me on Windows. All the Linux software I want that I don't have free (beer) equivilents on Windows have a native Windows port. This comes to the sum total of the Gimp and Mozilla. I use Mozilla for my day to day browsing and find that it works just fine for me. Plus I no longer have to go through crap to configure the graphical environment, and my hardware all works out of the box without patching or tweaking.

Since I mostly do Java development, and jEdit, Ant, and Jakarta Tomcat all work on Windows, I have all the development tools I need. Windows does what I need from an operating system, better than Linux does.

So - what does Linux need to do before I return to it? (Or, for the hopelessly pendantic, what do Linux distributions need?) Several things:

  • Get rid of X as it currently exists.
    • I want never to have to deal with modelines, and I want standard resolutions to be available. (Namely, I want 1280x960 to be possible without having to use modelines, since it is the best resolution for my monitor to use.)
    • A user should be able to boot directly into the graphical environment, and configure it from there. I should be able to change resolution and color depth without restarting X, or any of my programs.
    • Fonts should be made readable, and it should be made possible and easy to get them installed through a standard mechanism. mkfontdir doesn't cut it.
  • Make software packaging sane.
    • If a package depends on a specific, exact version of another package, it should probably be part of that package. I never want to see "A depends B == 1.2.3.501294059122" again, so that when B develops a security flaw and becomes version 1.2.3.501294059123", I can easily update it without removing A. (Or playing the "were on earth did A come from, and why isn't it updated along with B?" game.)
    • Create the idea of standard programs that offer a standard set of features. For instance, A shouldn't require Mailer B, it should require a package be installed that satisifies the standard Mailer interface.
    • Allow graphical installation for complicated software. Loki created their own installer for their games, shouldn't there be a standard one that uses the system package manager? This would allow installations that have user requests in a nice fashion. Debian has something like this, but I'm invisioning putting up a download on a webpage that a user can then "run" and have an installer pop up that helps them answer any needed questions.
    • Along the same lines, create a standard mirrored update system like apt. Allow dependencies to be automatically downloaded with the user's agreement.
  • A simple, standard way for file types to be understood. If I write a text editor, I should be able to say "I can handle editting text." A web browser should be able to say "I can view HTML." The user should then be able to select the application that they would like to view or edit the file. (Since viewing and editting are quite commonly two different actions - viewing a JPG is quite different than editting it in the Gimp.)

These are just the things I most remember being annoyed at with Linux. There are others, but most of them have to do with crappy software. (I'd really like a nice, stable, easy to use media player, but I'm not currently willing to write one. Oh, and can someone remind Nautilus that it's dead? It sucked when it was a bad e-commerce idea, and it still sucks now. It is far easier for me to deal with files using Windows Explorer than it is with Nautilus.)

So will I always use Windows? Probably not. I intend to reevaluate Linux from time to time, and if my situtation changes, I very well could find myself back using Linux. But presently, Windows is a far better operating system for me to use.

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Why I Switched Back to Windows from Linux More

Why I Switched Back to Windows from Linux

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  • I know how you feel, I always manage to end up with a broken system ;). I'm currently waiting for Slack 9 before I start again from scratch.

    Fonts should be made readable, and it should be made possible and easy to get them installed through a standard mechanism. mkfontdir doesn't cut it.

    Doesn't fontconfig fix this? Copy your fonts into ~/.fonts and it works, and "fontilus" is a Nautilus plugin which adds a fonts:// URL.

    The rest of your comments though I totally agree with.

    • Kinda my experience too. Every couple years I drag out the most recent accumulation of (by then moderately outdated) linux CDs and hopefully apply them to a sacrificial system. After a variety of fails or inadequacies, I shrug and go back to my well-trained, stable Windows environments that do what I tell them, without argument.

      So far the only promising experiment was Mandrake 7.2, which tho not by any stretch "there" yet, at least mostly behaved itself and didn't tick me off.

      I keep hoping, because WinXP
      • Well, whenever I end up with stuff like this it's usually because of one dodgy upgrade... In this case it was XFree86 4.3.0 - everything was working great before then, compiled Gnome 2.2.1, latest development/stable kernels, everything... now it's all broken. But I still use it for GUI stuff with remote XFree86 on my laptop :).
        • And people say "DLL Hell" was bad. It has nothing on linux version madness!!

          I've never gotten far enough with one to do any upgrading. The two that lasted the longest -- RH6 wouldn't let me install anything (something was screwy somewhere.. it also wouldn't let me set up any users so was running as root ALL the time, then one day it forgot its password and never let me log in again!) ...and Mandrake 7.2 won't have anything to do with the WP8 CD. *sigh*

          Someone just sent me "College Linux" so I'll give that
          • BTW, usually, you can reset your root password if you forgot it by using "linux single" in LILO. (Plus there are some evil things you can do in rescue mode to change passwords. I don't really want to get into it, since it doesn't really matter.)

            Anyway, I've had RedHat manage to decide that there were two versions of a several packages on my system. (Don't know how that worked.) It made updating software a real hell. (This is on the Linux server a keep for use as a webserver/database server/whatever.)

            • Yeah, I've found that RPM sucks. A lot. I always compile from source, both on my Slack machine, and my RedHat server (only local for me and my parents, doesn't do much except hold my ~100MB mailbox, do web filtering, host my testing sites, and some other crap).
            • Mucking about in LILO was a bit beyond me at the time (and might still be, since I've never had to do it :) but yeah, I gather there were ways past the lost password if I'd truly cared. I'd been going to nuke RH off that box for some time anyway; this just confirmed that resolve.

              I'll never do a boot-manager style dual boot again, tho. This RH6 came with BootMagic and installed from Windows; the system already had DOS/Win95 on it, and all was fine there til I uninstalled RH and BM. Apparently BM didn't unin
  • I agree wholeheartedly... the reasons you listed are a large part of what drove me back to Windows as my primary system too (though I have a Linux box as well)

    Another thing that reverted me was hardware support. I realise this is mainly the fault of manufacturers for not recognising Linux as a system worthy of support, but it is still a problem.

    Simple example: Due to an excellent deal I got a Nokia 7650 camera-phone free with a new contract. Naturally, I wanted to use it to its full capacity.

    With Windo

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